Storm

Lightning lit up the sky as a post script to the powerful storm that just rolled through our rural area of Kewaunee County in northeast Wisconsin.

A severe storm had just pushed through. On the horizon, the sky turned a wild, orangeish-red and the lightning continued to flash for awhile. I’m afraid I was a little late to the party. I should have gotten my camera out sooner. I was able to capture three shots with lightning – this, being the best one.

In the foreground you see the farm field, planted with corn in its early stages, soaked with water that reflects the brightness of the lightning. This shot was taken from a third-floor vantage point in the attic or our home. Very cool to watch.

This is one you’ll want to view in the larger version to see the fine detail in the lightning. You can do so by clicking on the image.

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The skies look threatening over this rural Kewaunee County, Wisconsin farm house. As it turned out, the sky’s bark was worse than it’s bite. As evening set in, there was plenty of lightening all around, and storms in the distance but no real storm resulted here, just a bit of rain.

As the sun was setting the evening of Wednesday, June 8, 2011 a storm front was moving in. Of course, I grabbed my camera. With a little digital magic I was able to capture the dramatic transition from peaceful sunset to stormy night.

My camera (Sony SLT-A55) has a mode it calls “Sweep Panorama” that stitches multiple photos together to make a larger image. I used it and got a nice image…but it wasn’t large enough to capture what was really happening. I could get some of the dark, angry clouds or some of the calmer sunset – but not both. The lens and photo frame were not large enough to fit the early evening drama in the same image.

In order to capture the full scene I wanted, I took five separate photos and stitched them together on my computer with a handy, free program from Microsoft called Image Composite Editor, or ICE.

As I said, this image is the composite of five individual shots. The final, combined image was over 100 mega pixels. And, as if that weren’t large enough, I actually tried to join 17 different individual photos together, but the final image turned out bent and distorted.

I definitely recommend you view the larger image. To do so, just click the photo.

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